[Introduction: To celebrate this glorious day of American Independence, I am reposting an essay about the greatest Founding Father of them all. We could have been cursed with a small-minded bigot on the battlefield of freedom at Valley Forge and Yorktown. Instead, providence blessed us all with a man from Mount Vernon free of antisemitism. To quote Liel Leibovitz and Tony Badran, American by the Grace of God.]
The Silence of Anti-Semitism and the Voice of George Washington
(Originally posted November 6, 2023)
George Washington was not a cosmopolitan man. He never traveled to London or Paris. He never visited Africa or Asia. His physical world was tidewater Virginia, the woods of western Virginia and the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia to Massachusetts. Compared to the modern President of Harvard University Claudine Gay, what did Washington know about the larger world? Not much.
Somehow, however, a man who lost his father at a young age and who had chilly relations with his mother did not understand, nor accept, Anti-Semitism. Just like me. We have witnessed silence and a failure to condemn anti-Semitism straight away out of the President’s office at Harvard.
It is my pleasure to introduce you to a different President who gave voice to moral clarity. Before the Hamas Horror of October 7, 2023, before the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, before the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s, and before the Dreyfus Affair of 1894, there was a man who rejected anti-Semitism…because it was the moral and right thing to do.
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Removed from the pogroms of Europe, George Washington grew up in a frontier world where religious tolerance was in the air. The idea that someone would favor one religion over another religion repulsed Washington. “As president, when writing to Jewish, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other congregations—he officially saluted twenty-two major religious groups—he issued eloquent statements on religious tolerance.” Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow, page 132 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington:_A_Life
The man lived what he preached.
Whenever he needed to hire a carpenter and a bricklayer at Mount Vernon, Washington could absolutely not have cared less whether the man was Jewish or not. And I quote — “if they are good workmen, they could be Mahometans, Jews, or Christian of any sect, or they may be atheists.” Id. That mindset is the stuff of America’s founding father.
Want to know more?
When his stepdaughter Patsy suffered from uncontrollable bouts of epilepsy, Washington sought out leading doctors “in Williamsburg, including eight visits to Dr. John de Sequeyra, the scion of a prominent family of Sephardic Jews in London.” Id. at page 153
The religion of the doctor mattered not to Washington. What mattered was whether the doctor could cure Patsy. Modern Woke doctors and medical students could take a cue from Washington.
Washington was not Jewish but why in the name of God should the religion of one’s doctor matter? Seriously, people.
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Washington dined and relaxed with all sorts of people, including the Jewish merchant Mark Prager, Sr. Id. at page 534
We as Americans are blessed and we don’t know it. Fate could have handed us a small-minded racial bigot as the Founding Father. (For an example of a horrible personality as a Founding Father, see U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_McReynolds) Instead, we got someone who gave voice though actions and deeds to the dignity of man. (It is not relevant to this essay but the closest man to Washington throughout the American Revolution and countless battlefields was a black man, William Lee.) https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/william-billy-lee/#:~:text=For%20two%20decades%2C%20William%20Lee,silk%20ribbon%20around%20his%20hair.
As President, Washington made it clear that the United States of America was not a Christian state. How did Washington manifest a largeness of spirit solely missing on the Harvard campus today?
“A few days after Congress adjourned on August 12, (1790),” Washington set out for Newport, Rhode Island. “A Jewish merchant and fellow Mason, Moses Seixas, greeted the president on behalf of Congregation Yeshuat Israel,” (and) sought words of reassurance in a letter since “the Jewish congregation had formerly been deprived of the invaluable rights of free citizens.”
Did Washington ignore the letter? Did Washington issue some wishy washy statement to please the media?
When confronted with a moral question of tolerance and anti-Semitism, Washington issued one of the timeless expressions of tolerance in presidential literature:
All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship…For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens…May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants. Id. at page 632
That is moral leadership in the year 1790, boys and girls.
Conclusion: The loss of historical memory is an intellectual crisis in our country today. If more young college students, and college presidents, remembered the example of our first President on anti-Semitism, we would not witness the disturbing images we see today in the land.
All hail to the original voice of religious tolerance in our country. We are not the Middle East where ancient religious hatreds are baked into the system. Much praise to the man from Mount Vernon who stamped our country from birth as welcoming of Jewish Americans.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11739
[Conclusion: “As students of the Bible and of Hebrew, we are inspired by the fact that the Hebrew name for America is Artzot Ha’Brit, or the lands of the covenant. Ours is a covenantal nation, which means that each generation must renew the covenant with the Almighty and be found worthy anew of the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…God bless America.” American by the Grace of God: Becoming a citizen of this great nation is a divine gift, not a universal right by Liel Leibovitz and Tony Badran, Tablet Magazine, July 2, 2024.]